Humor in Word of Mouse
A study by Sharpe
Partners, an Interactive Marketing Agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet Users in America share content with others via e-mail.
This is excellent news
for those Companies who use self-propelling Word-of-Mouse” e-mail techniques to
sell their Products.
The study generated some
interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded,
as well. The most popular content is Humorous Material.
The second most popular
category is News, followed by Healthcare and Medical Information, Religious and Spiritual Material, Games, Business and Personal Finance Information and Sports/hobbies… in that order.
So it is easy to see that Humor is the best Content for your Viral E-mail campaign.
Cartoons, Jokes and Funny Video Clips are among the things that can be
added to an e-mail to insure
that it will go Viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them
laugh.
They are a lot more
likely to hit the forward button and send your E-mail to their friends and
relatives if it is an “entertainment” rather than an advertisement.
Not along ago, about 35
million people got an E-mail containing a picture
taken in Disneyland. It took a minute
to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone
in front of the famous
Cinderella Castle. The title
of the
picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral E-mail advertising
Disneyland and
used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious… and it
worked.
I’d guess that most
people who own a Computer have seen that picture… and thus the advertisement
for Disneyland. The bird flu epidemic is
newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to
any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.
Remember that people are
much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else, so you
would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.
